Clay Travis and Buck Sexton are stuck between Trump loyalty and moving on

After 45's third failed election as kingmaker, dead Rush's replacements are losing fans on both sides of the argument

Since Clay Travis and Buck Sexton teamed up in June of last year, the combination to their show’s messaging hasn’t exactly been rocket science.

Fauci is the worst bureaucrat in American history. Masks don’t work. Vaccines are bad (but don’t mention the President that oversaw their development.) Biden is old. Companies are woke. Global inflation is Democrats’ fault. Ron Johnson is on the show again. Crime is so bad that you’re literally going to be killed if you don’t vote Republican. Clay blurting out midterm predictions that turned out, impressively, to be nearly 100% wrong.

Since the Republicans blundered their opportunity to take back both the House and Senate in a historically favorable political climate, however, something has changed in their calculus. Sexton and Travis have begun to peel back their layers of unyielding Donald Trump fanaticism, if only for a few minutes at a time. They are fleeting, but there are moments where Clay seems to wildly suggest that there is a party and opportunity outside of the Trump orbit. Minutes later, however, Sexton will qualify it — “We’re talking about this out of love, because we do love the guy. He’s done so much for this country and very well might be the next President.”

This short, on-air exchange perfectly illustrates the difficult spot that this relatively young show — which is most certainly not the biggest in the country, as Travis repeatedly claims it is — has found itself. The majority of dead Rush Limbaugh’s former listeners who have stuck with the new format are staunch Trump supporters, and have spent the last month voicing their displeasure with Clay and Buck even questioning their leader’s grip on the party:

There is also no question how much Trump has done for the hosts’ careers, individually and as a pair. Buck Sexton can’t go a week without talking about how he met with Trump about lockdowns in the Oval Office, and Clay Travis’ rise to lead GOP grifter on Fox News was no doubt fueled in part by Trump’s retweets, Outkick the Coverage radio interviews, and the MAGA social media movement at-large.

On the other end of the equation, the pressure for GOP propaganda programming like the Clay and Buck Show to move on from Trump is building. Fox News has begun to tone down its coverage of his rallies and Truth Social rants, party leaders are stirring after another disastrous electoral outcome, and to the extent that there are sane, reality-based Republicans left — they are pushing for a move to a new standard-bearer.

This all leaves Travis and Sexton in a tough spot. Will they betray the majority of their already-shrinking, Trump-loving listener base that Rush left behind? Do they dare go against the will of the GOP establishment that has propelled them to the ‘golden microphones’ in the first place?

Time will tell, and there is plenty of time for them to walk the tightrope ahead of the 2024 primary and general election seasons, but a true reckoning is coming.

It’s just not the one that Clay Travis and Buck Sexton had hoped they would see.